Mike Brown’s Body

There once was a Kansas farm boy who, at the young age of 24 and unburdened by a college education, made one of the great scientific discoveries of the 20th century.

Clyde Tombaugh grew up in little Burdett, Kansas, where he turned his curiosity about the night sky and a mechanical gift for building homemade telescopes into a job with far-off Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. There, in 1930, he discovered our solar system’s ninth planet, Pluto.

The Strip couldn’t help thinking about Clyde’s feat when it read the news recently that a California astronomer, backed up by NASA, is claiming to have discovered the “tenth planet. “ Meanwhile, some skeptical scientists look forward to the official naming of the new discovery so that both objects, the new one and Clyde’s Pluto, can be designated minor planets. A similar debate about Pluto’s status raged a few years ago, but the icy sphere managed to hold on to its status as a full-fledged planet. This time, we’re not so sure it will.

But this meat patty gets ahead of itself. Let us back up a little.

Eight years ago, several months after Tombaugh died, the young Strip had one of its most humbling experiences. In the basement of a building at Lowell Observatory, your narrator found itself staring at a wall that contained hundreds of large, yellowing envelopes. Norm Thomas, a retired astronomer, was showing us around, and he winked and reached up for a particular parcel on the wall. He took it down and showed us some notes in pencil on the envelope. It was Tombaugh’s handwriting. Then Thomas opened up the envelope and showed us what was inside.

It was the Pluto discovery plate itself — a photographic negative of a portion of the sky in the constellation Gemini, taken back in January 1930. Among the thousands of tiny star images on it was a speck that turned out to be the ninth planet.

We shivered as Thomas carefully put the glass plate back on its shelf. We were in the basement because this chuck roast was reporting on another Lowell astronomer, a man named Robert Burnham Jr. — author of a famous and beloved set of books on the night sky — who had died a few years earlier. In the 1960s and 1970s, Thomas and Burnham had spent their nights at Lowell exposing their own set of photographic plates, using the same telescope that Tombaugh had used when he found Pluto.

As Thomas explained the difficult nature of using photographic plates and the painstaking effort of identifying tiny star images that showed movement on the background sky, we developed a deep appreciation of what Kansas’ native son had achieved.

Tombaugh had been summoned from his small prairie town back in 1929 because the observatory wanted him to help find the elusive Planet X, which the observatory’s founder, Percival Lowell, had predicted would be a massive body beyond Neptune. (Pluto was too small to be Lowell’s Planet X, but Tombaugh’s discovery became the observatory’s most famous.)

Finding Pluto had been a daunting task. Tombaugh had patiently spent hours and hours guiding a telescope as it soaked up starlight. Then, after preparing the large photographic plates, he had placed two at a time into a “blink comparator,” a noisy contraption that showed him tiny portions of the sky captured on different nights so he could detect the telltale movement of a solar-system interloper. For months, Tombaugh methodically photographed the great beyond, looking for a celestial needle in a haystack.

In February 1930, Tombaugh found his quarry on plates he’d exposed the month before. Ever since then, Pluto has been as much a part of human culture as it is a frozen outpost that spends most of its time behind Neptune. So when scientists started debating several years ago whether to downgrade it to a mere asteroid, Pluto fans howled in protest. This sirloin likes to think that at least part of the reason that Pluto’s supporters won out in the end was the romance of Tombaugh’s story and the difficulty of his task.

Sure, the eggheads had it right — Pluto is more properly thought of as a “trans-Neptunian object,” an icy remnant of the solar system’s formation and a member of something called the Kuiper Belt, which is made up of planetoids held at bay by the gravitational forces of the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

But even though Pluto is a pipsqueak — not even half the size of our moon — the nature of Tombaugh’s discovery and its cultural impact have historically been good enough arguments to keep it on the varsity squad.

But more and more pipsqueaks keep showing up.

In 2002, a California Institute of Technology astronomer named Mike Brown, working with a colleague, found a Kuiper Belt object they named “Quaoar,” which is about half the size of Pluto. In 2003, Brown and his team found the farthest object yet detected in the Kuiper Belt, which they named “Sedna.” It’s also about half the size of Pluto but orbits much farther away.

Each of the discoveries provided ammunition for those who wanted to downgrade Pluto. Astronomers, after all, didn’t want to designate Brown’s objects as planets.

Partly, astronomers felt that way because the new little planetoids made it obvious that Pluto was a minor leaguer. But also, this proteinacious porterhouse believes, scientists didn’t want Brown’s little worlds to be considered planets because Brown was a little annoying.

In the case of each discovery, Brown and his team had violated standard protocol by offering the names Quaoar and Sedna for the two objects before the official naming authority, the International Astronomical Union, had even assigned numeric designations for either of them. Brown seemed to be jumping the gun (with NASA’s promotional weight — even though NASA has nothing to do with naming new worlds). The grumbling about Brown’s grandstanding never really bubbled up beyond Internet science forums, but even Brown himself, on his Web site, acknowledges that hardly anyone in the scientific community who debated Sedna’s naming, in particular, had anything good to say about him.

“I do truly believe that the complaints come from only an extremely small subsegment of the community and should not be taken terribly seriously,” Brown tells the Strip.

In any event, Brown is back with a new discovery — a Kuiper Belt object that’s larger than Pluto. And this time, Brown is pushing for its planet status like a Hollywood press agent.

Brown and two colleagues found the object in January, but they wanted to keep it secret until an important September conference, the better to get lots of publicity when they made the claim that they’d found the solar system’s tenth planet.

But a few weeks ago, Brown became aware that he’d inadvertently left his records on the Internet, allowing another scientist to find the observations. (This has been reported in the press recently as a “hacking” of Brown’s data, but the Caltech professor himself acknowledges that hacking was not actually involved.)

Forced to act or get scooped, Brown hastily called a press conference and announced on July 29 that his team had found the solar system’s tenth planet, an object that may be half again as large as Pluto. Brown hasn’t publicly revealed what name he has submitted to the IAU, which has given the new object the dry designation 2003UB313. Protocol calls for Kuiper Belt objects to be named after creation deities — Quaoar was a Native American spirit, Sedna an Inuit goddess. Brown and his team informally refer to their discovery as “Xena.”

As in television’s warrior princess.

Which is only more reason to believe, the Strip is telling ya, that some members of the scientific community who already consider Brown a publicity-seeking blowhard will try even harder this time to slap down his grab for immortality.

Unfortunately, in the ensuing battle over just what to call Mike Brown’s body, Kansas’ own Clyde Tombaugh may end up being the loser.

When we asked our favorite local astrophysicist, the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Keith Ashman, what he thought of Xena, he said it was time to draw an official distinction between the major planets and trans-Neptunian objects, including Pluto.

“Pluto ain’t a planet. Let’s retread Tombaugh as the discoverer of an entire class of objects (TNOs) and drink a toast to him when TNOs revolutionize our understanding of the formation of planetary systems,” the irascible Ashman wrote in an e-mail.

That leads us to predict that soon, we’ll have to get used to the idea that our solar system has only eight wandering worlds.

The alternative — credit for Mike Brown as the discoverer of a major new planet — would just be too hard to swallow.

Sorry, Clyde.